DeX opens up a world of PC possibilities...

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(Image credit: Samsung)

Samsung has officially unleashed its new DeX app which allows you to hook up a Galaxy Note 10 to a Windows PC or Mac, and use the phone in a desktop environment (effectively on top of the desktop OS – with added benefits which we’ll come onto momentarily).

If all this is new to you, let’s explain a bit further: DeX previously allowed you to connect your Samsung smartphone with an external display, to use your handset and mobile apps on a large screen.

Then you can run all your mobile apps on the PC’s desktop within DeX, or watch videos from your phone, play mobile games on the larger display of your desktop PC or laptop, and of course benefit from the use of a keyboard and mouse where that might be handy.

DeX dragging

And there’s a big bonus here in the form of being able to drag-and-drop files directly from your phone to your PC, and vice versa. So you could take a photo from your Note 10 and whip it onto the PC to tweak it up in a proper heavyweight image editor, for example.

Furthermore, as XDA Developers observes, Linux on DeX is available via the DeX app, allowing you to create a container and run an Ubuntu Linux image, giving you even more flexibility and options here.

It’s not clear what Samsung intends to do in terms of giving users with older Galaxy handsets backwards compatibility, but at the moment, this is strictly a Galaxy Note 10-only affair, as mentioned.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the app does warn that your phone might get hot running the DeX application, although exactly how hot likely depends on what you’ve got the hardware doing, of course.